The Madrid company Teatro Defondo, with 21 years of professional experience, has denounced the “ideological veto” by the City Council of Valdemorillo (Madrid) by suspending the performance of ‘Orlando’, by Virginia Wolf, which was scheduled for next November.

In a statement released this Wednesday, the company’s producer, Pablo Huertos, has indicated that the decision has been made after the arrival at the Department of Culture of the member of Vox Victoria Amparo Gil Movellán.

The representation had been agreed upon with the government team prior to the May 28 elections and was to take place on November 25, 2023 within the 7 Villas festival of the Community of Madrid.

Huertos qualifies the measure of “attack against freedom of expression and against culture”. As he explains, in a telephone conversation with a technician from the town hall, it became clear that it was “a case of ideological veto by the incoming councilor (…) because the protagonist of the show goes from being a man to a woman”.

“We want to denounce that a work of universal literature and a world-renowned author have been banned, neither this nor any artistic piece should be subject to political censorship in a State of Law,” he stated.

Huertos rules out that the decision may be due to economic reasonssince the cache of the show is much lower than usual, nor artistic, since the show has performed more than a hundred functions throughout Spain “with an unbeatable reception.”

He has also been a finalist in the XXII Max Awards and winner of the XXI Ciudad de Torrejón de Ardoz contest for stage directors, among other awards. “Neither her theme nor her poetry can hurt”, considers the producer.

“Trying to demonize culture and reduce it to tendentious labels is only the first step towards burning books that do not conform to the dominant ideology,” he warns, while rejecting any type of political censorship“wherever it comes from”.